Modern communication systems have a large number of capabilities including integration of various communication modalities with different services. For example, instant messaging, voice/video communications, data/application sharing, white-boarding, and other forms of communication may be combined with presence and availability information of subscribers. Another capability of such enhanced communication systems is conferencing between subscribers of various networks.
While communication between endpoints within an enhanced communication system is commonly facilitated through an advanced communication protocol such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), traditional networks such as Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) are not capable of taking advantage of these protocols. Thus, when a user employing a legacy device wishes to join a conference, they may not be able to take advantage of advanced features of communication protocols like identifying a conference server by its Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
Some conventional systems enable users to identify a conference they want to join by a numeric identifier, and then look up the conference in a look-up table of conference database. This means, the components of the communication system (i.e. servers) would have to have a static structure limiting capabilities of the communication system and increasing its vulnerability to crashes and delays due to equipment failure.